Business owners know that marketing is necessary in order to get the word out about the business and to help generate sales, but it’s often a frustration point for the CFOs or those that are responsible for managing the money. Marketing requires an investment and sometimes the ROI doesn’t come as quickly as hoped. This is often why when money gets tight, the marketing budget is the first one to get slashed. Many business minded folks still don’t understand that marketing is usually a long term investment as opposed to a quick fix, and SEO is a prime example of this.Read more...

Social media marketing, like other online marketing tactics, is a long term investment. Simply setting up social profiles and starting to share some content isn’t going to result in a quick uptick in sales or conversions. Social profiles take time to build. Marketers get this but it’s usually the “money people” in the company that don’t and tend to get frustrated. A successful social media campaign involves an investment and it can be difficult measure the exact social media ROI. Sometimes this means that social media activity gets scrapped altogether. It shouldn’t! There are ways to gauge social media success that can be reported back to management.Read more...

Publishing content on a regular basis has become a necessary component of an online marketing campaign today. Content is what engages target audience members and attracts the attention of search engine spiders. It also helps to fuel a social media strategy by ensuring that there is always something worthy of sharing with followers. In order to maintain this steady stream of content, it’s recommended to add a blog to your website. It helps to keep your website content “fresh” which is viewed favorably by both the search engines and target audience members.Read more...

In order to improve online marketing efforts, a business needs to participate in content marketing. Content is what gets found by the search engine spiders and generates links from an SEO perspective. Each new blog post is an additional page on the business website that is an opportunity to target relevant keywords and keyword phrases. Over time, these posts will get crawled and indexed by the search spiders and can appear for related searches. They also help to keep the website content “fresh”, telling the search spiders that you want to provide a good user experience. Blog posts also help fuel a social media strategy. A business social profile is only beneficial if it is active and blog posts provide a constant supply of content to share. Read more...

Savvy business owners now realize the importance of a social media strategy. After all, social media is where the people are. Millions of people sign into at least one social media account on a daily, or even hourly, basis and the majority of social media users use more than one social media site regularly. This means that marketers need to be in the social space too. Social media for business isn’t just a customer service tool, but it’s also a way to improve brand awareness and should be integrated with all other marketing efforts. Social media is important. We’re not saying that it isn’t, however some businesses are starting to have the wrong online marketing priorities and are favoring their social sites over their business website. Here’s why that’s a bad idea:Read more...

If you want to get noticed online today just having a website or even a few social profiles isn’t going to cut it. Every business in your industry is doing the same thing. In order to stand out and improve SEO efforts you will need to be creating content on a regular basis. Good content will get noticed by target audience members and search engine spiders alike. For SEO purposes content marketing is essential because it helps build links pointing to a site and delivers traffic. Creating fresh content on your own blog is a great start but eventually it’s important to branch out and start to look for guest blogging opportunities. It’s just important to have the right priorities when it comes to guest blogging. Don’t just guest blog to get a link.Read more...

The web is made up of links and these links are what the search engine spiders follow in order to determine how certain sites and pages are connected and how they should each rank for certain keyword search phrases. This is why link building is such an important component of SEO. Inbound links pointing to a site are what convey trust to the search engine spiders. A link to a site almost serves as a “vote” for that site, a signal that the site offers something worthwhile. Inbound links tend to be the focus of an SEO campaign, but what about internal links on a website that point to other pages within the same site?Read more...

We all know that Google is a great resource. Ask anyone where they go to find important information and there’s a good chance that they will respond that they “Google it.” However, Google has so much more to offer beyond search capabilities. For website owners, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are necessary tools that provide vital information about the performance of the website. These tools provide an inside glimpse of how Google views the website and allows website owners to make changes as necessary. While these are arguably the most important tools for website owners to use, Google offers plenty more. One often underutilized tool is Google Alerts.Read more...

We all know that links are an extremely important part of SEO. Inbound links pointing to your site are what help to convey trust to the search engines. Links coming from high authority sites are very beneficial. Perhaps one of the most high authority sites on the web is Wikipedia. If you conduct a search for just about anything, it’s likely that the corresponding Wikipedia page shows up within the first few results. Obtaining a link from a site like Wikipedia is a huge link building win, so how do you do it?Read more...

As one of the top social networks, Twitter can be extremely beneficial in promoting your business as long as you know how to use it properly. A Twitter brand page appears prominently in the search engines for a branded search and many people will check out company social profiles in addition to the company website to find more information. Twitter has millions of users, but you don’t even have to be a Twitter member in order to see public Twitter feeds. You never know who could stumble upon your Twitter profile which is why it’s important to maintain a good Twitter presence for business.Read more...